Blog ← Designated Nerd ← Software and Lasered Goods ← Page 2

Quitting All Your Running iPhone Apps To Save Battery Life: Still Bunk.

Jun

2

2014

I wrote a bit about this right as iOS 7 was coming out, so now that iOS 8 has just been announced, I wanted to link to this excellent, exhaustive blog post by Scotty Loveless, The Ultimate Guide to Solving iPhone Battery Drain. The TL;DR: Turn off background fetch on any apps you don’t want ...

Before and After: Time Converter 24

Feb

14

2014

There’s a running joke in the development world that the worst programmer you’ll ever meet is yourself from six months prior. When you open up code you wrote three years ago, you’d better be ready for bats to start flying out. I recently updated the iOS version very first app I ever wrote, Time Converter ...

Fun with Work Downtime: Cat2Cat

Jan

20

2014

My employers at Vokal Interactive have been kind enough to let me use my downtime to tackle of one of my biggest irritations with the new Asset Catalogs in Xcode 5: The fact that you still have to use the fragile imageNamed: system to call images in code. With the consultation of some co-workers and ...

Force Quitting All Your “Running” iOS Apps To Save Battery Life Is Total Bunk

Aug

15

2013

I had to go to the Apple Store earlier this evening to get my trackpad fixed (and they totally cranked out a fix in 10 minutes – thanks, guys!), and I overheard a Genius telling a couple complaining about the woman’s phone’s battery life that they could save battery life by force-quitting all their “running” ...

The New Shiny And Its WordPress Friends

Jun

27

2013

As you can see, I’ve updated DesignatedNerd.com to a brand spankin’ new site – I’ve cleared out a lot of the crud and moved everything over to a WordPress backend so that I could more easily take advantage of the awesome templating system available with it. In addition, I also updated EllenShapiro.com, my personal site. ...

Code Freebie: BrowserChooser for iOS

Jul

14

2012

I’ve published my first iOS open-source project, BrowserChooser. It demonstrates the use of a category I wrote to allow users to open a link in Mobile Safari or Google Chrome for iOS. The code is ARC-compliant and published under the MIT license, meaning it’s free to reuse in any type of application. Submit a pull ...

Quasi-Related: Make Your Own Moving Labels

Jul

27

2011

I originally typed this info up as a response to a post over at Lifehacker. While this falls outside of most of my technical help suggestions, since it involves using technology to make your move easier, I decided to put it up over here. The last time I moved, I found something that helped me ...

This Damn Thing Is Stuck On My Screen, and I Can’t Type

May

10

2011

This is a slightly more advanced problem than most of the ones I’ve covered so far, but this saved me so much time and aggravation, I wanted to share how I dealt with this problem in detail. On OS X, Spaces and text expansion software don’t really play nicely. If you switch back and forth ...

Dude, Where’s My Safari Address Bar?

May

8

2011

There are two possibilities, depending on what you’re seeing. This is how the top of your Safari window should look, with the address bar: If it looks like this instead: Then you have accidentally hidden the address bar.

Help! My Mac’s Screen is Showing Negative Colors! 3

May

8

2011

Let’s say your Mac should display a screen like this: But instead it looks a bit more like this: Somehow, the “show negative colors” preference has become activated.